Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Stubs: Questions and Answers

The idea to get Henderson drunk enough to start talking came
from Reba, and I wondered if it was a good idea. He was clearly operating way
below his pay grade at the moment, and I wondered how up the food chain he had
been, before things had gone to hell, and gotten there in a hurry. But the rain
had set in and the compound was secure. Henderson wasn’t wearing a uniform and
there were no rules that said he couldn’t have a few beers, and then a few more,
with friends.

“How much do you know?” Reba asked Henderson, after most
everyone else had stopped drinking and gone back to their living spaces.

“What do you want to know?” Henderson finally replied. “You
didn’t have to get drunk to ask me, you know.”

“Where are they from?” Ray asked and Dawn sat up and leaned
forward, her hand on his back.

“We don’t know.” Henderson said. “We do know that the story
that was told, that they were from space isn’t true, or the version of that
story isn’t true. We simply don’t know.”

“Do they leave invisible, uh, poop. I’ve never seen or smelled
anything of them.” Dawn asked and then she giggled and everyone laughed.

“You’ve notice they regurgitate clothes, rings, jewelry, and
anything not carbon based. Cotton clothes disappear but all the blends get the
organic matter dissolved and they regurgitate the rest, from what we could
gather.” Henderson said.

“So how come we can’t see inside of them?” Ray asked. “And
how come they can fit an entire person inside of them and not be bulged out a
like a snake?”

“I saw one eat a horse once,” Henderson said, “and it never
looked any bigger. I can’t go into detail as to where I was or what
circumstances, but it’s a good theory that the Stubs aren’t confined to the
same dimension we are. I think where they’re from is where the food goes. I
think they’re basically mouths that feed and it gets sent back as energy. We
were scanning every frequency we knew that had been created by any device we
knew, and it took is a decade to figure out which one to jam to keep them from
blinking out. What we didn’t realize until about that same time, that jamming of
their frequency also kept any new ones from coming in. They can survive about
two years without food, which is why you see them dying right now. We’ve got
what’s left, and what’s

left may be in the
millions, trapped. But we’re hunting them now, and while we think those that
are here can still feed with the frequency jammed, they can’t send anything
back to wherever it is they came from and they can’t leave, and no one else is
coming in.” Henderson seemed oddly animated at this point and Reba pushed
closer beside me. “We’ve made contact with about two dozen different camps in
the states, but there’s no word from anyone else.” He said.

“Is there any place safe?” Dawn asked. “Any place that
didn’t get hit?” She sounded like a little girl asking if there was any ice
cream left after a house fire.

“We don’t know, but we don’t think so.” Henderson popped the
cap off another beer and drank half of it outright. “We figured out late, very
late, in the game that shooting one, or hitting one hard causes it to blink
out. Thousands were shot before we could get the word out to stop but by then
there were everywhere. Worse, when one got popped, more blinked into to where
that one was. That’s why it seemed like there were so many of them. We estimate
there was never really more than a million or so in New York City before it fell.
You see the videos of what seems to be waves of them, but there were never so
many that we couldn’t have beaten them if we had just figured it out more
quickly.” He killed the beer and picked up another one and popped the top.

“I’m sorry for what happened, but no one on this planet
caused it, or made it worse.” He sighed. “All the damage we did, all the damage
I did, was done after things had gone to hell. The president and half the
senators were killed when a Stub blinked into the command bunker and the Secret
Service opened fire. As far as we know, there are still a dozen live Stubs in
there right now. We’ll check in two years.” Henderson looked down at the floor. “You have
no idea. You will never have any idea at all, at how close we were to being wiped
out, how close we came to not finding the right answer at the right time.
You’ll never know what it feels like to see extinction.”

Facebook Badge

Donate To The Dogfood Fund

About Me

The Non Disclaimer

My writing reflects the things I see, think, and experience, and those things in my past that have led me to be me. It is not always pretty, it is not always funny, and no one has ever made mention of my life as a Disney Movie. If sex, drugs, profanity, or a general irreverence for all things religious somehow offends you, well, there are other blogs which will satisfy your need for self assurance.